REVIEW: H IS FOR HAWK

THE GIST

H also stands for Honesty

SPOILERS AHEAD

H Is for Hawk works because it understands that grief isn't something you neatly overcome. Sometimes you just find something that helps you survive it long enough to eventually face it. For Helen, that something is Mabel.

Going in, I had only seen the trailer and thought this looked like a nice story. I was also happy to see Claire Foy gracing the big screen again. I had only just watched her in Savage House, where she impressed me, and here she gets something completely different to sink her teeth into.

After the death of her father, Helen doesn't seem to know what to do with herself. She can still function. Sort of. She talks to people, goes to work and tries to continue with life, but there are little signs almost immediately that something isn't right. She snaps at people before quickly apologising, aware that she's behaving badly and seemingly embarrassed by it. She's there physically, but mentally she keeps slipping somewhere else.

So she throws herself into falconry.

At first I saw this as Helen running away from her grief. The further the film went, though, the more I started seeing it differently. She wasn't running from her problem. She was surviving it.

The amount of time and effort Helen puts into caring for Mabel gradually seems to steal from the time and effort she should be putting into caring for herself. Her house deteriorates. She withdraws from people. She misses responsibilities. At one point somebody knocks on her door and Helen simply sits there silently until they leave.

Even the makeup and wardrobe department must have saved a bit of money on Claire Foy's character. 😂 Helen increasingly looks like somebody who has stopped bothering with any of it, which is exactly the point.

The people around her begin noticing the obsession too.

Her mum warns her not to "get lost", which I took less as getting physically lost and more as a warning about disappearing inside herself. Her friend eventually suggests that Helen is over-identifying with Mabel. Helen denies it, but the film gives us plenty of reasons to think otherwise.

One of my favourite examples comes when Helen is driving and imagines her father sitting beside her. The film cuts back to reality and Mabel is perched on the seat instead. It felt almost too perfect. Mabel has started occupying the space her father left behind. That makes a later training sequence even more revealing. When Mabel flies away, Helen panics and cries that she's going to lose her. On the surface she's talking about the bird, but underneath it feels like the terror of losing her father all over again. She has attached so much of herself to Mabel that the possibility of losing the hawk becomes inseparable from the loss she is already struggling to process. Claire Foy sells all of this beautifully.

There are moments where everything around Helen seems to become one big wall of noise as she mentally disappears into memories of her dad. Even when she is being reprimanded after missing a class, she isn't really there. Her body is standing in the room, but her mind is somewhere else entirely. The filmmaking also knows when to leave her there.

The score isn't constantly telling us what to feel. Sometimes there are these long, suspenseful notes during Helen's encounters with Mabel which emphasise how intimidating this animal actually is. Other times it's the absence of music that makes the scenes work. The quiet makes you watch the bird. It makes you watch Helen. It gives you room to sit in the discomfort with her.

And Mabel should feel intimidating. Some of the footage of the goshawk chasing prey through the woods is genuinely impressive. Knowing that much of the bird work was achieved practically only makes me appreciate the patience that must have gone into capturing some of those shots.

But the falconry isn't there just because birds look cool in slow motion. It gradually becomes Helen's way of understanding death. She talks about old falconers describing the bond between human and bird as love. Later she tells her niece that Mabel means love, which I found particularly interesting considering what this bird has come to represent after the death of somebody Helen loved so much.

Then there is the lecture. Helen brings Mabel along and is questioned about allowing the hawk to kill things. What starts as an explanation becomes increasingly emotional. Helen talks about how death is always there but we spend our lives trying to hide it away. Hunting with Mabel, she argues, is an honest encounter with death. Eventually she blurts out that we are all going to die. And there it is. This was never only about her dad dying. Losing someone you share a close bond with creates this horrible emptiness, but grief also forces something else upon you: mortality. That thing we all know is coming but generally do a pretty good job of pushing to the back of our minds is suddenly standing right in front of you.

Helen cannot push it away anymore. Falconry gives her a strange route towards accepting it. Mabel kills because Mabel is an animal. There is no cruelty or politeness to it. No euphemism. No attempt to make death more comfortable. It simply is.

There's another small scene I loved where Helen brings what looked like a bottle of whisky to the man who has been helping her after Mabel successfully catches prey. Helen thanks him for believing in Mabel. "I believed in you," he replies. Helen has missed the point. The people who genuinely help her are not really supporting the bird obsession. They're supporting Helen.

That distinction becomes particularly clear with her friend. Helen's family visit and comment on how disgusting her house has become, effectively seeing the symptoms of depression without really treating them as symptoms. What Helen receives is judgement at a time when she needs help. Her friend handles it differently. No interrogation. No lecture. No judgement. She just helps. And Helen sheds a tear. Sometimes that is what somebody needs when they are barely holding things together. Not another person pointing out how badly they're coping. Just somebody willing to sit beside them and help carry a little bit of it.

Eventually Helen begins moving back towards the world. Her father's funeral appears to provide some kind of release. She seeks professional help. She admits to her mum that she has depression. Most importantly, she chooses to spend some time away from Mabel — not just a break for the bird, as her mum points out, but a break for Helen too.

Her mum tells her that sometimes she goes too far, but then she comes back. It immediately reminded me of the goshawk. Helen had gone too far as well. And she came back.

That is ultimately what I took from H Is for Hawk. Helen loses her father and the grief is simply too much to process all at once, so she dives headfirst into falconry. It becomes unhealthy. It isolates her. It begins replacing parts of her life that desperately need attention.

But I'm not sure that makes it entirely a bad thing.

The nature of falconry gives Helen a way of confronting death and mortality at a slower rate. The rate she needs.

Grief isn't just the pain of losing someone you love. It's the pain of having to continue living without them.

It's having all those comfortably suppressed thoughts about death and your own mortality dragged into the stark, cold reality of everyday life.

It's a shit show to get through.

H Is for Hawk doesn't pretend otherwise.

It just shows it honestly.

And sometimes, that's all a story needs.